(continued)
... snip ...
DeiRenDopa said:
Zeuzzz said:
The fractal scaling relationship of dimension 2, that was a key prediction of plasma cosmology, and has been independantly confirmed recently, shouldn't you say?
Er, no.
As I have already said (do you need me to cite the post numbers?), results from SDSS, 2dF, WMAP, etc are clear ... the large scale structure of the observed universe is inconsistent with a "fractal scaling relationship of dimension 2".
I would appreciate it if you could take the trouble to read the posts I write.
Er, no. You have this completely backwards. The results from SDSS are infact very strong evidence of the fractal scaling relationship of dimension 2 predicted by plasma cosmology.
Since i've taken the time to respond to your above points, I may aswell make a start on your list of the "evidence against plasma cosmology", and will start with your very first point.
You stated:
1. Observations show that the universe has a structure that is inconsistent with Lerner's fractal scaling relationship. Here is an SDSS PR showing the observed large-scale structure; here is the corresponding paper.
The SDSS survey that you point to as an inconsistency is in fact further confirmation of this prediction by plasma cosmology proponents.
Two things to get us started:
1) As I said in another of my posts responding to this one of yours Zeuzzz, it seems that much of the text of your post is copied, maybe with some minor editing, from other sources. Is that so? And if so, would you mind citing those sources, for the text I am quoting in this post please?
2) Zeuzzz the spin-meister who needs new reading glasses is at it again!
Note that I referred specifically to a particular publication by the SDSS team (and the associated PR); you chose to mis-interpret that as a reference to the SDSS survey!
I'll grant you that you may not, yet, have grokked that 'large-scale structure' inextricably includes the meaning 'right up to the very edge of the observable universe', so while interpretation of some SDSS data may be consistent with a fractal dimension of ~2 up to some (modest) scale (~Mpc or ~tens of Mpc, say), that's only a quite narrow range of scales.
For example, in this publication (
L. Pietronero, 2005), titled "
Basic properties of galaxy clustering in the light of recent results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey", Pietronero and his colleagues note that;
"The recent SDSS results for these statistics are in good agreement with those obtained by us through analyses of many previous samples, confirming in particular that the galaxy distribution is well described by a fractal dimension D ~ 2 up to a scale of at least 20 Mpc/h.", the exact value for the fractal dimension that plasma cosmology proponents predicted years back.
Yeah Jones et al. do say that ...
However, I think you should have been a bit more careful, and
a) acknowledge that 'at least 20 Mpc/h' is quite modest with respect to the scales probed by SDSS (etc);
b) note that the Jones et al. (2005) paper is at least as much about how to derive the 3D distribution of mass from surveys such as SDSS as it is about fractal scaling (see
Swanson et al. (2008), for example, on whether Jones et al. (2005) were right or not about 'luminosity bias')
c) enter a giant caveat concerning, at the very least, a need to show that the predicted PC fractal dimension is the same (or similar) as that in Jones et al. (2005) ... I strongly suspect the two are actually incompatible.
Further support for this conclusion has been offered by Yurij Baryshev et al, (
Fractal Approach to Large-Scale Galaxy Distribution 2005) "
modern extensive redshift-based 3-d maps have revealed the ``hidden'' fractal dimension of about 2, and have confirmed superclustering at scales even up to 500 Mpc (e.g. the Sloan Great Wall). On scales, where the fractal analysis is possible in completely embedded spheres, a power--law density field has been found. The fractal dimension D =2.2 +- 0.2 was directly obtained from 3-d maps and R_{hom} has expanded from 10 Mpc to scales approaching 100 Mpc. In concordance with the 3-d map results, modern all sky galaxy counts in the interval 10^m - 15^m give a 0.44m-law which corresponds to D=2.2 within a radius of 100h^{-1}_{100} Mpc. We emphasize that the fractal mass--radius law of galaxy clustering has become a key phenomenon in observational cosmology.".
Yeah, but ...
This reminds me of the Peratt spiral galaxy model ... his simulation can produce some nice 'look at the pictures!' similarity while completely overlooking a fatal flaw.
In this case the whole issue of 'galaxy bias' - which is tied up with 'luminosity bias', and much more - is given rather short shrift. I think you'll find, when you dig into the details, that this Baryshev and Teerikorpi paper should be rather troubling for any PC proponent. For starters, it concludes that there is a cross-over scale (to homogeneity, from fractal scaling); PC does not permit large-scale homogeneity. For seconds, the scaling applies to a universe ruled by GR, with CDM built in to the logic chain that leads to the fractal scaling conclusions; to claim that this paper is consistent with PC would require rather a lot of work to re-do the calculations without GR and CDM.
And another paper with similar conclusions based on a wide range of redshift surveys;
Fractal Holography: a geometric re-interpretation of cosmological large scale structure - General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
The principle parameter to the estimated from the observations is the fractal dimension D (as i'm sure you know). This reduces to enable estimating how the average number density of galaxies changes with the volume of a sphere with the centre at the observer. This quantity obeys the law: [latex]\left\langle{n}\right\rangle\proptor^{D-3},0<D\leq3[/latex] When dealing with a uniform poisson distribution, D = 3, giving a constant average density. Otherwise it goes down and in the limit of an infinite sphere reduces to zero. The latter situation is just the case of a fractal universe, and the fractal dimension of ~two predicted by PC proponents seems to fit very closely with recent observations.
One thing that is very hard to conceptualize with fractal cosmology is that if the universe around us is of a fractal nature, a simple looking into deep space would not reveal it. This is an important property of an infinite fractal system. If you are looking from any specific occupied point the system looks the same, regardless of the direction you are looking, sometimes referred to as 'conditional isotropy'. The immediate consequence for an infinite fractal cosmos is that it will produce the same picture of the sky as the homogenous universe.
"
Numerous estimates from the large number of galactic catalogues that exist so far estimate a value of D = 2±0.2, within distance of roughly 50h-1 Mpc. This D = ~2 might have remarkable cosmic significance. This is the border value which just ensures, within the static hierarchical cosmos, the compact projection of the galaxy spatial distribution onto the celestial sphere, what is tantamount to the isotropy as observed on the sky." (Petar Grujik, 2006)
(also see some of the links in my previous post on fractal nature, and fractal scaling of plasma currents and filaments, that was dismissed before for merely being a "spam attack"
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3681728&postcount=105 )
... snip ...
All well and good ...
... and all the more troubling that you think this is helping you make the case for PC!
A rotating (spinning?) lawn sprinkler can produce a nice spiral pattern; does that mean spiral galaxies get their shape from the same sort of mechanism? Of course not.
As I understand it, from the material you have posted, Lerner's scaling relationship refers to (mass) density vs scale, and falls out from his idea of how galaxies form (gravitational collapse being the last stage). It explicitly excludes any CDM, as well as any role for GR ... so if the input mass (ranges) are wrong, maybe it's just a fluke that he ends up with that particular fractal scaling?
Then there's the issue of internal consistency.
For example, if 'intrinsic redshifts' apply to a significant fraction of extra-galactic objects, then the basis for the analyses in Tegmark et al. (2004), Jones et al. (2005), Baryshev and Teerikorpi (2005?), etc is wrong ... and the conclusions thus useless.
Ditto with respect to 'plasma redshifts' (not to mention all the other problems such crackpot ideas would introduce to most of the astrophysics 'the rest' of PC apparently relies on).
-----------------------------------------------------
That's four parts of Zeuzzz' long post addressed, and so far a four out of four (to over-summarise: PC, per Zeuzzz, is either woo or wrong, 4 out of 4 times).
(to be continued)
If I propose a viable alternative it is not a false dichotomy. If I did not have an alternative, that would just be using the same idiotic strategy the ID'ers use; they 'prove' science is wrong, therefore, god *must* exist. I propose a viable alternative scientific theory. See the difference?
)